Targeted advertisement is a major revenue source for the cable/Internet Protocol television (IPTV) industry. In order to achieve a more localized advertisement, ad insertion markup for the Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG)-2 transport stream (TS) was standardized in the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers SCTE 35 standard.
SCTE 35 is very widely used in the cable and IPTV industry to mark ad insertion points. The edge equipment uses these points to replace parts of the original content with an appropriate advertisement during the scheduled ad breaks. Recently, there has been a trend to use the SCTE 35 segmentation_descriptor for reporting various stream events (such as program changes) to the downstream equipment.